From Our Special Correspondent.
Weihsien, Oct. 8, Dawn was on time, but the carts were not: it was well after eight when I left T: fu. We were a party of six, including the drivers, with two placid, white ponies and four mules with sore backs. My Chibli mafoo took charge. Pictwe rotund little man, with eyes searcely visible, wearing a pair of cast-off foreign riding breeches and puttees neatly twisted, and possessing just the right air of rascality to make him reliable. His panama hat sat at a jaunty angle and I soon discovered that he rode the faster mount. My Japanese companion had decided not to ride, so I saw him to talk to only when we halted. The mafoo, however, was conversational enough until he began to feel the effects of a Chinese saddle, to the use of which, he informed me (I had paid for it the day before) he had long been unaccustomed.
The road at first skirted the city wall, divided from it by a broad moat over which willow trees hung gracefully. It was @ grey morning with promise of more rain, though the northern horizon hemmed a lake of deep blue. It was chilly too, sufficiently cold to make a cardigan jacket none too thick beneath an outer one of khaki. Now and then the sun shone fitfully, brightening the line of bare hills that enclose Tsinanfu on the south.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.